The latest release of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (Visual Studio 2013) will empower development teams to live up to the demand of a new breed of applications, to develop and manage modern software that provides the best experience across multiple screens and devices, always-connected services. The wave of extra ALM features will help to become more productive and eases the collaboration between team members with improved support for agile development practices: Agile Portfolio Management, Team Rooms, Test Management from the browser, Work Item Charting, on-premises support for Git repositories, Code Health Indicators (CodeLens), Cloud Load Testing via Team Foundation Service, the connected IDE experience across all your Visual Studio instances …

An important trend which continued to be reflected in the 2013 release is the improved integration towards other Microsoft products (for example System Center and Windows Azure). In that respect we will probably also see some upcoming modifications in the integration with InRelease, a release management solution from InCycle. Microsoft reached an agreement to acquire InRelease on June 3, 2013. The solution allowed software development teams to automatically deploy and track applications (from Team Foundation Server) as a whole to multiple environments – up to production – based on a business-approval workflow.

While the official release of Visual Studio 2013 was planned on November 13 with the Launch Event, the RTM bits were already made available on October 17, 2013.

Before the official release, the public could experience already the more tight integration with Windows Azure. For example:

The Cloud Loud Testing feature to provide virtual machines that generate the load of many users accessing your website at the same time.

But, important new announcements were made at the official Launch Event. Team Foundation Service became Visual Studio Online in the perspective of broadening the complete offering to indicate that Visual Studio Online will become the services component of the developer tools for the future.

Visual Studio Online, formerly Team Foundation Service, is the home for your project data in the cloud. Get up and running in minutes on our cloud infrastructure without having to install or configure a single server. Set up an environment that includes everything from hosted Git repos and project tracking tools, to continuous integration and an IDE, all packaged up in a monthly per-user plan. Connect to your project in the cloud using your favorite development tool, such as Visual Studio, Eclipse or Xcode.

Visual Studio Online is now running in Commercial Preview mode (paid usage is enabled and price plans have been announced) and will shift to General Availability somewhere in 2014, after all billing services have been put into place. Until that time, everyone may still freely use the system as an early adopter. Cloud Build and Cloud Load Testing as described above are already part of the released features of the service, while 2 new preview features have also been announced at the Visual Studio 2013 Launch event: Application Insights and Monaco.

Application Insights, Build-Measure-Learn

This Visual Studio Online feature now provides a 360 degree view of running applications by collecting, processing and displaying a wide variety of telemetry in three areas: performance, usage and availability.

Without any effort during the development lifecycle (seamless integration experience), development teams will benefit from the extensive set of collected diagnostics to analyze what’s going on in their deployed applications. With these valuable insights, future (to-be-developed) improvements can be more focused and impactful. Application Insights will be able to deliver the required metrics to adopt validated learning and to move into a real Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Monaco, Visual Studio in the browser

In an attempt to bring the client development experience in Visual Studio to the cloud, Microsoft released a preview of Monaco which immediately enables the development of Windows Azure Websites directly from any modern browser on any device. It complements the Visual Studio desktop IDE as a low-friction entry point that will help any developer to get started or make quick changes to an existing cloud service. It has support for C#, VB.NET, HTML5, JavaScript applications and PHP.

Time to wrap-up this article on the evolution of ALM/TFS in the final Part VII.

Last week I was in Seattle for the MVP Summit where I was one of the present 78 Visual Studio ALM MVPs to explore the future of the Application Lifecycle Management platform.

On Sunday I already enjoyed a full day of interesting MVP to MVP sessions and I do want to highlight one particular session from Sven Hubert, a German Visual Studio ALM MVP. He did a nice talk on extended dependency management with Team Foundation Server. Many of us will certainly have been in the situation where a custom solution was required to manage internal/external dependencies, but this type of automated solution really rocks. Be sure to check out his blog article where he described his solution to manage dependencies with Team Foundation Server. If you understand German, you might also want to have a peek at the AIT TFS blog.

The other days were filled with a bunch of interesting sessions about the (near) future of Microsoft’s ALM offering, given by the ALM/TFS product team. Good to see that the people at Microsoft are really listening to the customer/community feedback. They are also extremely passionate about the new features they want to introduce in the product. I had a blast to be part in this gathering at Microsoft and made a few extra important connections.

As announced at VSLive last week in Seattle, Visual Studio Lab Management will go RTM at the end of August 2010. On top of the general availability, the Lab Management capabilities will become available to all customers who have licenses for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN or Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN. This really rocks because it means that companies won’t have to pay additional licenses (as communicated in the past) for using Lab Management if they already have one of the above products.

I did setup Visual Studio Lab Management already twice in the past and after experimenting with it for a few months I must say this product has a big future. At many customers I have seen the pain of deploying and testing applications during the development phase. Many of these pains are properly addressed with Visual Studio Lab Management 2010.

The solution that’s used for the demo contains a web application project and a database project. Some automated UI tests with assertions are part of a dedicated Test Suite in a Test Plan with Microsoft Test Manager. A virtual environment has been created with 2 virtual machines (one will serve as the web server and the other will be the database server) in which a clean snapshot has been taken for deployment. The Lab Build will take the latest binaries of the solution and will deploy the web application to the web server (msdeploy) while the database project will be deployed to the database server. After deployment the automated UI tests will run in the virtual environment.

This week I’m in Las Vegas (on invitation by IDesign) for the launch of Visual Studio at Devconnections. The Launch Day of Visual Studio 2010 was great but on Tuesday and Wednesday there’s also a promising Application Lifecycle Management track I want to follow.

So, you are playing around with VS2010/TFS2010 and you have some remarks, suggestions, bugs, … Please go the Microsoft Connect site for product feedback and bug reporting.

Today I filed a suggestion for the next release of Team Foundation Server: Build Definition History. Unfortunately it’s still not possible to view history of changes made to the Build Defintion: “Drop Location”, “Build Agent”, “Trigger”, … On the Microsoft Connect site, you can easily look up other wanted featured and vote for them … but first vote for my suggestion!

Since a few weeks, there’s also a feedback survey running on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2. If you care about the product and want your voice heard, please take some minutes to complete this online survey!

A few days ago the GDR R2 was released of the VSTS 2008 Database Edition. One of the interesting features of this release is the fact that the Database Edition doesn’t require a physical SQL Server Database anymore on the development machine. It is no longer necessary to install an instance of SQL Express or SQL Server prior to using the Database Edition.

In my opinion the Database Edition is one of the most underestimated Team System Client Edition. It’s THE tool to manage database changes and to extend your team’s productivity and to improve collaboration with the database team. On top of the inner strength of the standalone edition, it’s now free if you already have a license for the Development Edition. Be sure to check it out if you’re faced with all kinds of custom work to manage your different database environments in your development lifecycle.